(Why am I up at 2am blogging about something so trivial? An attempt at gaining traffic based on an early brain-dump about a minor Twitter change maybe? Which this is, a brain-dump, there may be mistakes, but that doesn’t matter now, does it. As long as I’m “first!”.)
So here’s the email you get now:
- It’s HTML
- The user’s avatar is included. Sometimes this could be broken if the user changes their avatar, because the avatar URL would also have changed, but it’s hardcoded into the email at the previous URL. (unless they’ve solved the drifting avatar url problem with a consistent endpoint?)
- You’re shown the number of followers/friends/tweets of that user. But the followers/friends are separated by the tweets (updates) which is initially confusing and not easy to scan to compare the ratio.
- The FROM part of the email is now just noreply@twitter.com. This used to include the email address you have on your twitter account, which meant filtering your email based on which Twitter account these were sent to was easy. This is now in the REPLY-TO field in the email instead, can you filter on that? Or you can filter based on the TO field AND the FROM field as a combination, yeah that might do it. (Has anyone made a nice GMail filter for this yet?)
- Your username has been removed from the body of the email. Which means you can’t instantly see which account this person is following following (if you have multiple accounts).
- Showing more info in the email might be an attempt to reduce traffic on Twitter.com, but I can’t believe that would have a significant impact on their costs.
- I’m guessing the grey box in the email is supposed to contain the bio? I haven’t had one yet that does. Bug?
- The emails are sent as multi-part, which means the text version of old is still there for text-only email clients. Good!
- It would be great to see the most recent couple of tweets from that user. It’s usually easy to see if they’re spam just from that.
- Better still, show which friends/followers you share. Then I might gather the context, or the network we share.
- Or maybe the last few @replies to that person. This might show the level of engagement from other users, further indicating whether they’re spam.
Isn’t it fun making rushed judgements about the small things Twitter do? :) Anything I missed?
UPDATE: Twitter just made a small change to DM (direct message) emails, the FROM field no-longer has the real name of the person the message is from. It used to say “Josh Russell via Twitter”. Again, this was good for scanning visually and filtering on. It now just says “Twitter”.
Strangely they *have* included your email address as part of the FROM address, contrary to what it used to be which was noreply@twitter.com… The opposite to the change they just made on the emails I describe above. It would be nice to have some consistency on small details like this.
Posted May 7, 2009 in the Design category, with the tags: analysis, email, twitter, UI, and 4 comments
I was at Interesting 2008 earlier this year where we had a sneaky look at the redesigned coins, presented by their designer, along with the story of how they came to be. As the name of the event suggests, it was really interesting!
View large
What I didn’t notice at the time, is a design flaw that I’m amazed was allowed to happen.
Take a look at the coins, do you see it?
Read about the new coins at the Royal Mint
There are no numbers. Meaning that if you can’t read, or just can’t read English, you’re at an immediate disadvantage.
This is such an obvious omission! How did this happen! Are they assuming that people will know what the coins are based on the previous coins? It might be the first time some people see our currency, they will be clueless.
Now maybe the transition will help, for a while there will be both the old and the new coins in circulation. This will probably solve the problem through comparison and thus familiarity. But how long are these coins going to be around, and how long until the old one disappear? I assume that banks will be collecting the old ones for several years to come, but one day the new ones will be the only ones. People think very short term don’t they.
Also…. coins? really? We don’t need them anymore. This is 2008 after-all, it’s the future! How much is this costing? I’m willing to bet that the cost is somewhere close to what the cost of transitioning away from coins to a newer technology would be..
Posted November 11, 2008 in the Design category, with the tags: accessibility, coinage, coins, Design, interesting2008, money, UI, and 7 comments
update: The developers have now changed this on the site, email addresses are not revealed. However it is still revealing the domain of the email address, which, while not quite as bad, actually isn’t necessary and still leaves a hole. The pattern skitchusername@emaildomain.com, in my opinion, has a good chance of being a valid email (especially on privately owned domains that have catch-all aliases). Why reveal *any* part of the address? Users will either get a reminder email or they won’t!
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In this day and age, it’s 2000 and f*cking 8 FFS!
So what’s happening here..
As I finally got around to signing up for a Skitch alpha/beta/whatever (Thanks Jimk) I thought I’d just check to see if I already had. I tried my usual login details that I pretty much use everywhere for non-critical accounts. Both the usual usernames/nicknames were taken. Now this isn’t unusual, but as an early adopter this is rare for me.
I then decided to go and try and retrieve a password for one of those accounts (it’s possible it was me). Providing a username or email address should confirm that the account exists or not and then send the password reset instructions to the registered email. If this was my account, I would receive the email.
Skitch’s lost password form
In Theory, that’s a relatively ok way of doing that process. What went wrong was this.. Having entered just the usernames, I was then shown a screen that contained the email address for that account. It was not my email address.
Recap:
- email addresses are shown by providing any username
- usernames are used as personal URLs, thus easily found
- this is possible without being logged in, thus untraceable
Why is this a bad thing? Well apart from the obvious reason, it wouldn’t be very hard for someone to script up something that could systematically discover usernames, and thus email addresses.
Please, Please fix this!
There are surely other examples of this behavior, how long will it go on?
P.s. I really actually like Skitch, it’s a great tool. I’ve been using GrabUp more though, it’s much simpler.
Posted July 31, 2008 in the Technology category, with the tags: email, FFS, passwords, privacy, security, skitch, UI, UX, and 4 comments
Seriously, WTF?
What you see above you on the left is a feature listing for the “Dolphin” set of tariffs from Orange. On the right is the “detail” of those tariffs. Do you see the problem?
I want:
- unlimited mobile internet
- unlimited anytime, any network texts
- 600 anytime, any network minutes
Is that £30 or £35?
Not to mention that the tagline at the top reads “..weekend..” texts. Gah!? (Oh, and the typo on the left-hand £25 too, “unlimited anytime text”, not “texts”, oh no). And why do they repeat themselves directly under the same copy?
I lack any confidence in these people. And I haven’t even touched on bloody “fair use” clauses.
Now I suspect that the confusion may be because I’m an existing customer, I’m logged in, and it’s showing me the relevant content. That’s no excuse for contradictions. I also suspect that these prices may reflect different contract lengths. However, there is no mention of that. Plus I already have a contract, and do not need to extend it to change my tariff.
Send them (and all the others (and all the banks)) to the School of WTF, and get them to make sense. This reinforces my theory that most businesses make their money by confusing the customer or taking advantage of ignorance or stupidity. This is why we don’t like you. Are you listening?
Posted July 15, 2008 in the Mobile category, with the tags: Mobile, orange, tariff, UI, UX, and no comments yet
